Sure ChatGPT-4o is impressive, but can it recreate - not simply copy, but recreate, word-for-word - the entirety of the Quixote? Pierre Menard would like to know.

Mahler really has these kids singing “bing bong” and it works, best to ever do it

The prose quality of Wikipedia has increased tremendously over the past few months, one can only assume due to AI. For example, even six months ago you would not have seen a phrase like “it was imperative to spare them a destructive servitude” in a wiki article.

Finally got a chance to see Stalker on the big screen - no director has ever made a man look more like a saint than Tarkovsky did the Stalker

You can learn a lot about compound growth from the Pentateuch - possibly why the Jewish people make such excellent financiers

The image near the end of Rashomon of the monk holding the baby makes me think of the “virgin father,” which I have never encountered anywhere previously but, now that I’ve seen it, seems like an obvious inversion. In any case it is a gorgeous image.

From "Landing and Advancing toward Weihaiwei" - Kobayashi Kiyochika, 1895

Like Achilles racing Zeno’s tortoise, in observing the observer of myself an abyss of infinity opens and swallows me whole

In future, cloning+artificial wombs will be cheap enough that it will be illegal independent of any moral concerns bc possible for warlord to create clone army to challenge state monopoly on violence. Limited use for infertile will be allowed but only by licensed professionals.

Ruptures in Beethoven's late variation movements The majority of slow movements in Beethoven's late works are written in variation form. There are many reasons why these are considered the finest movements to have been written in this form.

Problem with like 80% of dating advice is that it implicitly treats it as a process of property acquisition instead of a process of falling in love (especially the “advice” aimed at men)